- Dr Carmel Smart is a Paediatric Diabetes and Endocrine Dietitian,who spoke to Nick about her research into childhood diabetes and also working at the John Hunter Children's Hospital. She also gave Nick a blood glucose test to see if he had diabetes (His blood glucose levels were ok but he did bleed on the table a bit)

- Professor Rob Sanson-Fisher is a public health program leader and explained to Nick his work in combining behavioural and public health approaches to health promotion and how hard it is to change a persons behaviour.

"This album (Sharkmouth) was done out of a labour of love because I like roots and blues music and I’d always wanted to do a roots and blues album."

"I chose Australian history because I’ve always loved any type of history. You’d think the two kisses of death for a gold album would be blues and Australian history, so it wasn’t done with the intention, it was just done as a labour of love which has proved to be really enlightening."

"Producer Mitch Cairns’ foresight was out of desperation of staying alive. At that stage, Brian Cadd who I was working with, had decided that he was going overseas and he dropped the bomb on us that he might not be coming back."

"At that stage Jim Keays was very sick and Mitch said, “You’ve gotta do something or we won’t have any work!” And I said, “Well, I’ve got the blues album,” and he said, “Well FINISH IT!”

"It is a great thing (the success of Sharkmouth) and I have to thank particularly the ABC because they ABC embraced it from day one and just went ‘bang’, but the commercial stations just didn’t want to know. The ABC just broke it right across the country."

"If anyone was going to have a gold record this year you’d have put me at the bottom of the list."

" I think what happens with a lot of my peers, a lot of people will see a new record and whether it’s from Joe Camilleri, Daryl Braithwaite - they pre-judge it and don’t listen to it."

" I remember when we first started in Melbourne, Ian Meldrum said to me, “We’ll go and see Stan Rofe at 3AW.” Stan Rofe was a big star to me, he was on air and I’d heard him on the radio station and I said, “Well how are we going to do that?” and he said, “We’ll just go up to the radio station!”

"So we went up to the radio station and walked in and Stan came down and had a cup of tea with us. Ian said, “We’ve got this, what do you think?” and Stan said, 'Love it, I’ll play it.'And that’s what it was like."

“Well, Mitch and I spoke about it (initial expectations of Sharkmouth) and I said if we’re lucky we might sell 5,000 copies, if we can get an independent release.”

“We’d have sold them at gigs to try and get our money back and if we had a small deal with a company and sold 5,000 or 8,000 we’d have made the money back.”
Gold status is in 2013 is 35,000 and Sharkmouth is now creeping up towards platinum - it’s around 60,000 now and platinum is 70,000."

“When I did the unplugged album with Liberation it sold around 8,000 so it’s been a great experience for both of us.”

“We signed to an independent record company and they took it and then rang me up, the first time it went in to the charts at about number 89, then it jumped to 49 and I was over the moon. I rang Mitch and we celebrated, and then the next week it jumped 20 places again and it just kept going right up into the top 10.”

Russell has continued a great tradition started by The Beatles of being turned down by every record company in the country and then having a success.

“I tell you what is ironic, The Real Thing was turned down as well. EMI hated it, they thought it was the biggest load of rubbish they’d ever heard.”

“EMI didn’t want to release it, they were only going to release it in Melbourne to try and make their money back because I had a following in Melbourne, so Ian Meldrum and I got in a car and drove to Sydney to go and see all the (radio) program managers because at that stage you could knock on the door of these commercial stations before they became corporate and say, “Can I speak to the program manager,” “Here’s the song, what do you think, our record company think it’s a load of rubbish, would you play it?” 'Of course we’ll play it, will you sign that?'

“So we signed a petition that came out to really stick it to the record company. Radio and record companies at that stage weren’t getting along very well. It was just prior to the record ban where radio wanted to stop paying royalties to radio for playing songs on the air.”

Russell Morris is thought of as having lots of pop hits and a pure voice but he dabbled in blues back in the 1970s when he used musicians from Chain on one of his albums.

“They were my favourite band. I always use Barry Harvey and Barry Sullivan always, on everything, and I’d always used Phil Manning, so strangely enough it’s actually Phil Manning playing all those licks in ‘Sweet, Sweet Love’ and you’d think, 'Who’s this syrupy guitar player?' and it’s Phil Manning!”

“It’s (blues) where I wanted to head but I was painted into a corner once I had a pop hit and the record company saying, ‘You’ve got to produce another hit!’ and it became a factory after a while. You get caught in it.”

“I actually wished Chain had been my band because it would have taken me on a whole other direction. I don’t think Ian, Molly, would have been too happy although at that stage we’d sort of split."

"He’s still my best mate but we’d had a couple of professional disagreements. He saw me as Australia’s Davey Jones from The Monkees or some such thing and I wanted to go in a different direction completely as a singer/songwriter so we differed on the way we were going and the record company was pressuring for another single, but I really would have loved to be with a band like Chain.”

“But your fate is your fate. Whatever happens, those doors open and close for a reason and maybe if I’d started it earlier then it wouldn’t have worked.”

“I was happy doing The Real Thing, I quite liked psychedelia. I didn’t like pop a lot but I remember Ian (Molly Meldrum) had done a number of songs with me and we’d done ‘Only A Matter of Time’ which I absolutely loathe, it was on the back of The Real Thing, and a couple of pop songs and I said to Ian, ‘This is rubbish, we’re not going in the direction I want to go,’ I said, ‘I’m not John Farnham, I’m not Ronnie Burns and I’m not Normie Rowe. I want to do something that they wouldn’t even contemplate thinking about doing. I want to go in that direction. Let’s go psychedelia, let’s go into something more band oriented than a pop single.’

“Ian, to his credit, agreed and said, ‘You’re right, they’re not different enough.”

Russell Morris actually had a whole album ready to go at one stage and decided it wasn’t good enough and he wanted to re-record the whole thing.

“EMI had gotten a record producer and he’d gotten a head of steam up and away he went. I tend to go along with things and say to people, ‘I don’t know if this is the right thing …’ and they don’t listen, they don’t listen … and all of a sudden they go, ‘You know what? Scrap it.’ And that’s what happened. He went ahead and put strings and brass on everything and it just drove me insane. I said to him, ‘I’m not releasing it.”

Russell Morris on recording The Real Thing.

“We used 8-track recording for The Real Thing. There was only two tracks for the effects, one for the vocals, everything just kinda got bounced down, I don’t think we even slaved another machine to worry about generations. I think we did slave another machine for the effects.”

“I cannot take any credit for it. Ian Meldrum was the total architect, it was his concept from start to finish.”

“A lot of it was trial and error, experimentation, but giving Molly his dues he doesn’t know what he wants in the studio but when he stumbles across it he knows instinctively that it’s right. Everyone else will be nodding off at 3am and he’ll have had some poor bloody guitar player out there playing the part over and over, ‘No! Try it this way! Try something else! Make it sound like stars!’ And that’s what happens.”

In December 2011, Ian 'Molly' Meldrum had a serious fall while at home which for a while it seemed he wouldn't survive.

“He wasn’t putting up Christmas lights. I was with him that day and I think that was a story that got fed around.”

“I was there that day, the reason he fell is because of him. We were doing a song for Jerry Ryan who was doing The Green Edge, the cycling team, and I was doing a duet with Vanessa Amorosi.”

“Ian had the master tapes and he said, ‘Can you take these down to Sing Sing as you’re going home?” So I left.
“He was about to head to Thailand and he probably thought he’d catch some extra rays of sun. He’s got a latter cemented into the side of his wall which goes up to a sun deck. He was climbing up there with his mobile phone, his cigarettes and trying to juggle those and lost his balance and fell.”

“He would have died except his gardener, Joe, happened to be there. It was real touch and go as to whether he was going to survive but he’s great now.”

“It was funny. They (the hospital) said, ‘Ian wants to see you in hospital. You cannot talk to him about mobile phones. If he asks for your mobile phone you cannot give it to him. If he asks for drinks you can’t go and get him one. Do not talk to him about getting out of hospital."

"It was horrifying. I thought I was going to get in there and expected to see Ian sitting in a wheelchair and drinking soup through a straw, but I got in there and there he is sitting with his baseball cap on and his tracksuit reading the paper!”

“I said, ‘Ian, I expected you to be sitting here dribbling, everyone’s given me such a hard time!’ And he said, ‘Oh they’re all such pains in the ….’
“And they’d said to me, ‘You cannot stay any longer than 20 minutes and if he shows any aggravation you have to leave immediately.”

“My 20 minutes came up and I said I’d better go but he said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous!”
“I ended up staying for two hours.”

“I was also off to Thailand and flew out the next day. I got to Thailand and I got an email from Amanda Pelman who is Brian Cadd’s partner who’s great friend of Ian’s, and it says, ‘What have you done? Where is Ian? You were the last person to see him and now he’s disappeared?”

“After I left, Ian started to figure out how to get out of there because you can’t get out of the ward without a special card and the nurses won’t let you out.”

“He conjured this story and told told them, ‘I’ve decided to do physio’ which he’d been refusing to do, and they said, ‘Oh that’s great Ian, when do you want to start, Monday?”

“He said, ‘I want to start now, if you want me to do physio I want to go over and have a look and do it now.’” So they took him."

“They got a nurse to take him over and took him down the street and as they got to the street he turned one way and just kept walking.”

For most of us, it’s hard to imagine not knowing where we came from or who our family are, but for Lambton resident Michael Kenny it’s something he had to live with for 44 years.

Mick was forcibly relocated from an orphanage in England out to Australia with no idea where he was headed.

“At the age of six, I was asked if I wanted to go on holidays or told I was going on holidays. That was to an unknown land and we found out it was Australia,” Mick said.

Mick Kenny is one of the thousands of migrant children who were forcibly relocated from orphanages in the United Kingdom out to Australia, under assisted child migration schemes.

Up until the 1960‘s, it’s estimated that 7000 British children were brought to Australia, in many cases never to see their families again.

Mick’s earliest memory of Newcastle remains vivid in his mind.

“We’d been sent to the Murray Dwyer orphanage over in Mayfield West. About six weeks after, well we realised it wasn’t a holiday. We realised we weren’t going home.

“So six of us sitting on the side of the river bank, the Hunter river, we knew that we’d come by water and we thought if we could find something to get across that river, we’d be half way home - but nothing would float,” he said.

Mick and his fellow English migrants led lonely lives at the orphanage, rarely having visitors like those of their Australian schoolmates.

“There was 32 of us that come over, the rest were Australian kids in the orphanage and they had families that used to take them for weekends and holidays. But the pommy kids , like me , we’d have to stand in a line up while people would pick us to see who they wanted to go for a holidays or weekends.”

Growing up, the orphans weren’t provided with footwear to face the harsh weather.

“In the Winter times we’d be running around with no shoes on, we wouldn’t have shoes. We used to get sandals when the bishop used to come round and visit the orphanage and then as soon as the bishop went we’d have to hand the sandals back.

“So in the Winter months the feet would get cold and we’d have to race each other for the cow pats to stand in. Then in the Summer months the play yard was all tar and real hot days some of the tar would melt. So, we’d go from one extreme to the next,” he said.

Some of the treatment Mick faced at Murray Dwyer still haunts him.

“The head nun, she was big. She had to have been over about 6 foot four. She’d pick you up, me being a little skinny bloke, she’d pick me up by one arm and belt me with the other. She was very nasty that one.

“There was a little one that couldn’t catch us but she’d sneak up on us then and have a bunch of keys and belt you in the back of the head and draw blood,” he said.

“We were always told that we were orphans. We had no one. That was it. Us. Bang. I never even knew I had a mum. It was just one lie after the other that we were told.”

Mick with a photo of his biological family

Then in 1989, Mick’s life underwent a huge turnaround after he received news from a British social worker by the name of Margaret Humphreys.

Humphreys had begun an investigation into child migration with the aim of reuniting parents and their lost children.

After 45 years, Mick had finally been found.

“As soon as I walked through the door she said to me, you look like your father.

“She grabbed her purse, she pulled out a photo of me in a pram. She’d been carrying it for forty seven years,” he said.

Since their reunion, Mick has discovered a family he never even knew existed.

“Now I’ve got six brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and every time I go over there “oh my uncle Mick is coming”, they always say or ‘our Michael’ - and when they say ‘our Michael’ it makes me feel real close, real family orientated,” he said.

Initially, it was a difficult decision to make contact.

“It was hard going over there to meet them because I didn’t know what to expect. But when I finally met them we just cried and told each other stories and, you know, it was incredible. It was an incredible feeling. It’s a feeling that I still get every time I go over there and I’m so happy.

“That’s what it’s all about. Belonging. I hear a lot of people saying that they don’t talk to their families - life’s too short!” he said.

Mick at his Lambton home

Today, Mick lives by an important life motto. He has created a beautiful life, family and home by omitting the word ‘can’t’ from his vocabulary.

“People say that they can’t do it. There’s no such word as can’t!

“If I come over with nothing , which I had - nothing, and I’ve got a nice home like this, well there’s no such word as you can’t!”

When asked about his feelings toward those who put him through such a turbulent upbringing, he remains a forgiving man.

“People ask me whether I hold a grudge against anyone for this sort of thing. I say no, because if you hold a grudge - life’s too short to hold a grudge,” Mick said.

You're probably reading this on a smart phone right now, a device that lets you contact most areas of the world with the swipe of a finger. But telecommunications werent always that easy, the humble telephone once required people in offices (Or Exchanges) to connect your call physically.

A history tour by Telstra, focusing on telephone communication, was launched in Newcastle before making its way around the state. Along with several models of mobile and rotary phones the tour brought together some of Newcastles Living History.

Murial Roberts, Phyllis Gallacher and Gillian Halliday were three of Newcastle's telephone operators who have kept in touch after retirement and shared their switchboard stories with interested locals at Newcastle Library this morning.

Telstra's Telecommunications Historian Murray Rasmussen went through several of the tours artifacts inncluding a morse code machine, a wall phone from the early 1900's and Australia first mobile phone (which weighed over 10kgs)

The Bananas in Pyjamas are always smiling, they must have all corners of the happiness triangle in place. Professor Robert Cummins has been studying the happiness of Australians for 12 years, and the results of his 29th survey reveal that the things that make us happy, haven't really changed all that much.

On Monday Carol caught up with a long time friend, Redgums John Schumann. John, or 'Shooey' as he's affectionately known, is heading to the Hunter Valley this ANZAC Day long weekend to perform at the 2013 Gum Ball music festival.

While on the show, John introduced the new track by himself and fellow Redgum guitarist Hugh McDonald, called 'The Long Run'. For more information on John's ANZAC Day performance in the Hunter Valley - http://www.thegumball.com.au/

There's plenty of angst being expressed in Australia at the moment over 'the state of our media' and the federal government currently proposing media reforms to increase oversight of journalistic standards and media mergers.

Whatever your political position, the basic premise of self-regulation in media freedom has been supportive of fair and accurate reporting.

Michael Rowland of ABC News 24's News Breakfast program took to The Drum today to disassociate himself from a Sunday Telegraph story which he felt misrepresented him and was misleading.

You can listen to my interview with Michael here:

But I also spoke with independent analyst Andrew Catsaras for a historical look at journalism and the presentation of political issues in news.

Andrew quoted three eminent figures and their comments on just what journalism is, or should be, and you can view them here.

John F Kennedy's terrific answer from that 1962 interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMTl9tvUxCM - the question starts at 10.00 min on the clip and JFK's answer finishes at 11.30 (all up 1min 30 secs) just fast forward to get there.

larry Page, the famous record producer of the Troggs and the Kinks, and football fanatic, and Mancunian, Malcolm Hill, talk about the worlds most popular football club and the significance of their Aussie visit.

Larry recorded the team in 1972 with greats like George Best in the choir and pioneered the club song in the English first division with his song "Blue Is The Colour", still a favourite at Stamford Bridge for the Chelsea fans. He also recorded songs with the Australian cricketers in the 70's with the Chappell brothers, Lillee, Thompson, Marsh and co. making their singing debuts.

Lets have a listen to some of those songs including "Saturday Afternoon (at the Football)" sung by the 1972 Manchester United team, produced and written by Larry page.

A Royal Commission looking into alledged child abuse cases has finally been announced after much public pressure.

After receiving the SMS in the photo from a serving police officer, Carol today spoke with Greens MP and Justice Spokesperson David Shoebridge who has been calling for the Royal Commission for over a year, to ask how people with contributions to make, including whistleblowers, would be protected.

Midnight Oil have had a stellar career from their beginning as 'Farm' in 1972, changing their name in 1976.

With 11 studio albums and 2 EPs worth of musical meanderings, 1233's Carol Duncan was wondering just where do you start to choose just 36 songs for Essential Oils? The band's drummer and songwriter, Rob Hirst, joined Carol to answer that question and more.

Midnight Oil - Canberra 2009 - photo Bob King

"We began by thinking we wanted at least one song from each of the albums and EPs, and we wanted it to be chronological so you go on a musical journey with the band from 1978's 'Blue Meanie' as we call it, to 2002's Capricornia. Then we realised we had 170 songs we had whittle down to 36 and everyone lobbied heavily for their own favourites, emails were exchanged, carrier pigeons sent out and shot down and eventually we managed to get this order which I think now, with some objectivity, runs really well and does give you a good idea about what the band was thinking about at the different ages and stages, the different sounds of the studios, and what the producers brought to bear, also the different locations. We recorded everywhere from Tokyo to New Orleans to London to Sussex to Sydney to Melbourne so those places and the studios brought something different to the band."

How was the very Australian lyrical content of Midnight Oil's music received internationally, particularly when working with international producers to whom the angry political intent might have seemed a bit over the top?

"Yeah, the poms never really got us," said Rob. "I remember we played a series of shows at the Zig Zag club in North London before we made the 10 - 1 album in 1982, we basically had to drag people in off the street because we had this empty hall but then the Aussies found us and they alienated all the locals because they drank too much and were way too tanned and healthy-looking, and they were singing along heartily to all the songs they knew and the Poms at that time were probably more interested in The Clash or Elvis Costello or The Jam would sort of come in and then escape before they were pummelled by our audience, so it was a weird kind of stand-off."

"It was only a little bit later that we realised we were actually in the wrong country because shortly after we were really embraced by France, and Germany, Sweden ... so we realised that the food was better over there, the climate was better, there was a willing audience, the NME and Melody Maker wouldn't patronise us every week, so why are we here? So we crossed the ditch and everything was happy after that."

Growing up in the Midnight Oil heartland of Sydney's Northern Beaches I point out to Rob that the Oils were the band my brothers would go to see, the blokes' band.

"Yes, it was very blokey back then, it was a very brave woman who would enter the Royal Antler Hotel! There were some women there but they were very brave and had lots of tattoos. Seriously, the pub period was great for bands like ourselves, in spite of the danger to our female audience, it was a great testing ground for us. Not just the Royal Antler at Narrabeen which became a kind of home base, all of those northern beaches venues - Millers Manly Vale, Avalon RSL, and there was The Flicks in Manly which had a sloping stage and was operated at one stage by a fellow called Larry Danielson who we knew just as Larry and then later on people knew later on as the Woolworths Bomber - gives you an idea of the kind of people who were operating venues back then.We were playing 180 shows a year for the first five or six years, you could do it back then and they were big places, beer barns and enormous clubs."

"We started off in Sydney and moved to the other states and we used to road test the songs at the venues as well so if any of the songs had any weak moments you could easily see people drifting off or start to throw things at us or something, so it was very good for the music as well."

"We became road-tough in the tradition of bands like AC/DC who were just before us, and even the great Cold Chisel who started about 18 months before us, and the Angels. It was a busy time and that's all people did then, they went to see their band. Each band had an incredibly loyal audience who would turn up to all of those pubs and clubs around the place, and the occasional festival and that's all gone now, although the festivals are many more in number."

"Back then, there was only a few festivals, there was the famous Sunbury which we didn't go to but we did go to Tanelorn in 1981 (near Stroud) played with Split Enz and a few people. These days there are so many festivals which partly compensates for the fact that that amazing pub scene is no longer. It's a shame in regard to toughening-up of bands."

"I always thought that bands that survived that pub circuit of the late-70s and until the mid-80s when fire regulations and noise restrictions and dance music and other distractions came in and killed off the scene. I always that that was the golden age of bands, it was quite gladiatorial to play them, you were fed to the lions every night and you either toughened up and really learned how to play or you got out!"

I pointed out to Rob that being a spectator could be tough at times, too. "It must have been," Rob laughs, "I used to joke that I only joined the band to get out of the Midnight Oil audience. It was only partly a joke - I wouldn't have wanted to come and see us!"

The Break with Rob Hirst, left.

I actually did work experience in early high school was at Powderworks Records in Brookvale when Midnight Oil's Bird Noises EP was being pressed.

"Wow, that's fantastic!", said Rob, "Yes, we started out as an independent band on an independent label, which was Powderworks, and ironically our studio now, the studio owned and operated by Jim Moginie, is just around the corner in Brookvale from where we signed our first deal.

"Later on we signed with CBS, which became CBS Sony, which became Sony, which became Sony BMG and now Sony Music so we've been very loyal to the one record company ever since but from the first two albums and EP we were on this independent label, and it was that kind of fierce independence and determination not to repeat the mistakes of bands we admired but had ended their careers in tears way too early, it formed the early ethic of the band."

How do you maintain that independence when you've signed to a corporate monster?

"You get a rottweiler as manager for a start, I don't think Gary Morris would mind me referring to him in that way, he was fiercely loyal to the band and was much admired/loathed by the industry because his job was to interpret what the band wanted to do to a very staid and often arrogant and unwieldy industry that only saw one way of going about a career. We saw different ways which meant not appearing on Countdown, not playing gigs that we felt were unsafe to the audience or we thought we might be ripped off.

"That actually stood us in good stead because we managed to survive those early years and then go on to play theatres and bigger gigs and eventually head overseas. We haven't lost any members of the band, which is great."

Rob Hirst continues making music with a variety of projects and roles, "I've got a band called The Break which features Jim (Moginie), Martin (Rotsey) and myself from the Oils, and Brian Ritchie who played bass with the Violent Femmes and now lives in Tasmania and curates the MONA FOMA festival down there every January. We have a new album coming out next March (2013) and features Jac Howard from Hunters and Collectors playing amazing surf mariachi trumpet, which adds a whole other dimension, and I still play with The Backsliders most weekends. Jim's got a marvellous Irish band called Shameless Seamus, but Midnight Oil was always the main game so who knows, we might do a couple of gigs down the track sometime."

In 2002, Midnight Oil disbanded after singer Peter Garrett announced that he intended to more fully pursue a political career, but the band have done a few select shows since then including the 2009 Canberra show which was a warm-up for the Victorian bushfire relief concert.

"We needed a couple of warm-ups before going onstage in front of 81,000 people at the MCG in Melbourne, but it was great, it was quite life-affirming to feel that muscle memory come back as you approach different parts of a song and think, 'what the hell comes next', and then suddenly your hands and fingers and mind suddenly went to the right place. So we did two really energised shows at the Theatre Royal in Canberra which were recorded, thank heavens."

Rob Hirst sounds like a contented man who's been able to make a living out of what he loves.

"I hope I'm contented, but I hope I'm not smug because I haven't forgotten what it really took to get the men to stay together in all those rehearsals and backstage and buses and planes for 25 years. There were six members of Midnight Oil, including Gary Morris our manager, and there were times that everyone was on their way out the door.

"I think the great thing was that there was something in the back of our minds that the sum of us was always going to be greater than us individually and as long as there were some new songs that Jim and I could write and present to the band, new challenges live and some benefit shows to do, which were greater than just a band going out and playing songs, it needed to become part of a musical fraternity helping people out whether the tsunami benefit or the bushfire one, there was always something to look forward to. But we always took a lot of time off from each other just to defuse. We were kind of like a pressure cooker and eventually if you let enough steam out and get back together you can see the big picture again."

The pressure at times in Midnight Oil must have been considerable given it has always been a group of outspoken socially and politically minded individuals who made their statements very publicly, like their performance during the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games.

"There was debate pretty much until five minutes before we went out in the Sorry suits still figuring out if this was the right thing to do. There was only a couple of other people who knew we were going to make that statement. One was David Atkins who was producing the games, and of course a few close confidantes with Midnight Oil, but as soon as we walked out in front of that massive audience and this huge, thunderous cheer went up, we realised that people got it, understood the statement we were making. We were followed by the great Yothu Yindi playing Treaty which must be one of the greatest songs, not just protest songs, but greatest songs ever to hit the Australian airwaves and certainly by an indigenous band it's had the greatest impact so far. We felt we were in great company."

It was a beautifully subversive moment.

"There was, in typical Midnight Oil fashion, a lot of questioning and debate. We actually went out to the desert a few months before the Olympics to talk about it. We went out to Papunya which we'd visited all those years ago on the Black Fella, White Fella tour with the Warumpi Band, and we sat down in a creek bed for about three days and we spoke about the Olympics and the future of the band, lots of things under those amazing stars, to get out of the city and clear our heads."

"We've had amazing experiences collectively, it's been an incredible life. When I finally sat back and listened to the 36 songs on Essential Oils, all these memories plus others came back, good and bad, and I found myself getting quite tired and emotional hearing it all.

"We're not really nostalgic as a band, we don't comb over the past and we're much more interested in new music and new bands coming up in Australia and overseas, we're still musically curious and not wedded to the past but having gone back on the journey again I'm always amazed by just how much there is in it. Much more than just a band, a bunch of egos and some songs."

Do your kids know how to swim? Do they know where and how to swim in the surf?

With so much of the Australian population living on the coast, surf safety should be first and foremost in our minds.

However, of the 284 drowning deaths in Australia over the last year, 19% of them were at the beach. In fact beach drownings were second only to drowning deaths in inland waterways.

A lot of the summer water safety messages emphasise small children and swimming pools, but everyone is potentially vulnerable.

1233's Carol Duncan decided that her own kids needed more than simply being safe swimmers in a pool, but that they also needed to understand how the surf moves and changes, what a rip looks like, where to swim safely and when not to get in the water.

Lots of children get involved in Nippers each year, but that's not for every family so Carol spoke with a local surfing teacher about a program that involved more than just how to get up on a surfboard.

After rising through the ranks of the South African police force, Rory ended up chief of Security and personal bodyguard of Nelson Mandela. What Rory learnt from the man, once seen as a terrorist by South African authorities, changed his life forever.

"I was a cop for 18 years and in those days, we were trained in the ideology that the freedom liberation movements were considered the enemy. The problem with police is that they are the ones that enforce the laws and if the laws are unjust ones, such as those that were on the statute books under apartheid, then those are the ones that you enforced, so we considered them to be terrorists."

How did a policeman who believed Nelson Mandela is a terrorist, end up leading Nelson Mandela's personal security?

"It really only happened in 1994 when Mandela became President. Four years earlier when then-President F W De Klerk released Mandela from prison and removed the bans on the ANC and a bunch of other political organisations, I didn't believe any of the stuff he was espousing when he came out of prison saying things like, 'South Africa is for all her people both black and white ...', I'm going, 'Yeah, yeah, of course you're going to say that, that's the party line'. I didn't believe it for one second, I thought all that reconciliatory talk was just a facade."

"I just considered it to be untrue, a politician being a politician, saying things that are expedient at the time."

"It was only when I began to engage with the President and watch him, bearing in mind I was very privileged to be in the position that I was, it only took a matter of months for me to see that it wasn't a facade, that he was genuinely committed to reconciling black and white South Africans and to build a nation."

"That was his main agenda - nation building - and of course he'd had 27 years in prison to sit and contemplate what he was going to do."

"He came out with a very precise, very well thought out agenda of stretching out the hand of reconciliation and not doing what anybody else, me included, would have done and get your own back on those who imprisoned you."

In 2001, Rory Steyn released his memoir, One Step Behind Mandela.

Rory is currently in Australia, speaking at events organised by Anglican Aid. He caught up with Carol Duncan before his talk at Waratah

Is the backlash against broadcaster Alan Jones and his comments about the Prime Minister's late father a 'social media mob' or an example of old-fashioned people-power?

Writer and broadcaster, Peter Fitzsimons shared his thoughts with Carol Duncan after publishing his own opinion piece in which he says 'decent Australians' have had enough of the repeated denigration of women, particularly women in positions of power.